


If You'll Let Me, Here's What I'll Do

by volpeanon



Category: Prototype (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Mental Illness, ROBERT CROSS'S DICK CURES ALL AILMENTS MORE AT 11, a Boy Who Struggles To Get Out Of Bed, a Stressed Boy, but this is fanfiction so i do what i want, featuring ooc greene i guess she grew out of her hippie phase lmao, he sure could do with someone to come along and help him out eh eh eh eh nudge nudge, he's a sad boy, it's an android AU, remember kids romance isn't a miracle cure for depression, sweet lord in heaven i'm so gay, the self-indulgence train has become chronic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:35:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23157904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/volpeanon/pseuds/volpeanon
Summary: Alex Mercer is moving back in with his mother after suffering a mental breakdown. She has no idea about this 'mental illness' business, but she's at the top of a company that makes androids, so she knows how to throw them at a problem. The thing is, when you snag one for cheap that's come off the assembly line damaged, you can't be 100% sure you'll get what you bargained for.
Relationships: Alex Mercer & Dana Mercer, Alex Mercer & Elizabeth Greene, Robert Cross/Alex Mercer
Comments: 21
Kudos: 36





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> If anything deserves a shrug emoji, it's this. Have some Alex being an absolute mess.

Alex felt immensely awkward standing in his mother's enormous hallway. The bland, empty-eyed android that had driven him there took his one measly bag and his coat, disappearing off into the huge apartment as he stood there and debated for just too long whether he was supposed to follow - he'd lost it before he'd come to a decision. It was another minute before his mother appeared. The echoing approach of her voice told him she was on the phone, which wasn't surprising; it was how he remembered her, and it was how everyone else remembered her, too, because it had come up in the divorce proceedings.

"Alex!" he tried not to notice that the call was only on hold as she came up to give him a quick, cursory hug. She was, if anything, shorter than he remembered, but didn't look much older. "How are you, darling? You look- okay."

_ Gee, thanks. _ "Yeah, I'm fine." he hoped she wouldn't take his pleasantries to heart and think he'd been cured of crippling anxiety on the plane trip over. She looked at the bags under his eyes and his skin so pale he looked like he was trying to turn into one of those transparent fish.

"Well, that's good to hear. Flight okay? I've got a room for you over here." she led him to a living room like a set piece - he wouldn't have been surprised if she never used it, it looked like it should have ropes with 'do not touch the showpieces' signs on them cordoning off the seats - and an adjoining bedroom that made him cringe. The huge floor to ceiling windows afforded an incredible view of the city, a plethora of grey squares as far as the eye could see, lit with the occasional obnoxiously flashing billboard with ads playing in neon colours. The bed sat directly in the centre of the room, and didn't even have a headboard. She'd probably paid at least four figures for less bed than he could get at Ikea. Everything was various shades of white and grey and for a hot minute he wished he was back in his own apartment, which he hated - his grim little pod in a grim city for a grim job that couldn't leave him alone for five minutes - but at least didn't make him feel like he'd gone totally colourblind. "If you need anything you can ring this button and Mason will come and sort it," his mother bustled around the room, inspecting this and that (she could reasonably never even have been in it before, he supposed, there were enough rooms in this place that someone as utterly allergic to fun as her might not have explored half of them) "But I spoke to a therapist and he said I should be encouraging you to leave your room, so if you over-use him I might have him only serve you if you go to a different room to ask."

Oh, God. "You spoke to a-?" oh no, oh God, oh no.

"Yes, darling, a therapist, because you need one. I've got you booked with him on Friday, he's very good, you know McMullen had a year with him after the big court case, he came back better than before, honestly."

He felt cold dread curling in his stomach. This was  _ exactly _ why he hadn't wanted to come here. All he wanted to do was curl up and stop existing, and his mother was the kind of woman who got up to do yoga at five AM and had conference calls going until one AM. "I can't-"

"Don't worry about it," she flapped a hand like she'd thought of it already "Scarlett can drive you, it'll be easy. You won't have to do any of it yourself, that'll be great, won't it? You have to use her though, Mason can't drive, I got him cheap because of an eye fault. Very minor, you wouldn't know it's there."

"You had to get an android cheap?" he asked incredulously (in no small way hoping to change the subject as well) "How the fuck do you need to worry about  _ cheap? _ How do you have to pay for them if you make them? _ " _

"Language, please!" she frowned at him "It's called economy, Alex. Besides, when they come out with a minor fault there's all sorts of safety protocols that have to be done to make sure there aren't any other hidden faults, and it's very expensive and not really worth the effort. So we dole them out with a waiver for cheap. They go to brothels mostly, which is frankly a waste, but revenue is revenue, I suppose."

"Jesus, mom!"

_ "Language!' _

"Jesus isn't a swear word."

"It's crass. Can we not? I have dinner at six, I'll send Mason in to get you if you don't show up. Now I have to take this call- settle yourself in and do something useful, don't just mope, the therapist said you should have lots of hobbies."

Alex managed to keep his face straight until she'd closed the door behind him, then he flopped onto the bed with a whimper. The crisp blanket was thin and when he kicked off his shoes and slid under it, pathetically unsatisfying. He figured he might roll himself up in a ball under the desk when he could bear to stand up. He was supposed to be getting away from all the pressure that had broken him in the first place, all the expectations and demands and "you're the child genius, son of the child genius who worked her way to the top of the richest tech company in the world, you can do anything, quick, do literally everything right now". Now he was stuck with her _.  _ The definition of everything he should have, and failed to, be.

_ Fuck. _

The sky was starting to darken when his phone rang. He wouldn't have answered it, but it was Dana.

_ "Hey, you there yet?" _

"Yeah."

_ "Well? How is it?" _

"She'd hired a therapist before I even got here."

He heard smothered laughter.  _ "Okay, I can see why you wouldn't be thrilled about that, but hey, she's trying? More than she ever did with me. Just look at it this way, free catering in exchange for talking about your feelings for an hour once a week, and then she'll probably help her darling genius boy buy a nice house or something." _

"Or she'll try and make me get a job with her."

_ "Ohhh I didn't think about that. Yikes. Well, when you're better, you can come and hang out with me." _ a weighty pause hung, Alex biting his lip  _ "I'm sorry. I would've- if I had more time, you know I'd take you. But I know how it is, I can't help you like you need it right now. I bet with all the money she has she'll find a way to help, even by accident." _

"Yeah. I guess. You should see this room, it fucking sucks."

_ "Send pics, my dude." _

They sent idiot selfies back and forth and ragged on every item of furniture in the room, especially the bed  _ (Oh, God, why is it in the middle of the room like that? That's fucking weird as hell.) _ before Dana had to go. It was intensely quiet in her absence, and Alex held his phone against his chest and drew the paltry blanket up over his head.

He had fallen asleep when a knock roused him. "Dinner will be ready in ten minutes."

"Fuck off," he mumbled into the blanket, burrowing deeper. The knock came again.

"I'm to escort you to dinner."

He groaned and rolled over. He felt groggy and gross from falling asleep in his clothes, but the idea that he could muster the energy for a shower was laughable. The knock came again. "Fucking  _ fine." _ He curled up around a pillow as the intention to move hovered uselessly just out of his reach, his body living on its own plane of existence separate to any real life demands. The door opened.

"Dinner will be ready in seven minutes. Do you need any help?"

"No, I'm coming," the human-enough presence broke his stupor enough for him to finally move his legs and slide out of the bed. He went as he was, crumpled and stale, following it through the tall hallways to the kitchen. It was as huge and shiny as to be expected, and his mother was already sitting on a bar stool at a counter, fiddling with a tablet and a wine glass a few inches short of being a joke item with 'wine mom' on the packaging.

"Have you been asleep?" she asked, eyeing his rumpled appearance suspiciously. He grunted and sat down, as the android went over to pick up a task beside its companion at the stove.

"Jet lag."

"You have to soldier through jet lag, or it makes it worse, I do exercises."

The idea of him doing exercises at all, let alone on top of jet lag, was optimistic at best. He made a noncommittal noise and checked his phone aimlessly for news he didn't want to read, messages he didn't have the energy to reply to, emails that he'd ignored for so long there was no point in them sitting there marked as unread but he didn't have the will even to delete them.

The androids put plates in front of them, and he was given a glass of juice, like a kid. He frowned at it.

"When was the last time you had your six-a-day?" his mother investigated a spreadsheet with one hand, ate with the other, and apparently kept one eye on him at the same time.

"Are you serious?"

"The therapist said a good diet is the first step."

She absolutely had a point, he hadn't had a proper meal in probably over a year. It didn't mean he wanted to admit it. He also wasn't sure how to deal with her sudden invested interest; the last time she'd been this hands-on he'd let himself get dragged along behind her and ended up jumping from college right into a job he wasn't sure he wanted. Seeing as that had turned out like it did, he was understandably wary. "Then why do  _ you _ get wine?"

"Because I've earned it. Why don't we make it a reward? After you've seen the therapist, I'll get you something nice. What do you like?"

In terms of taste, not that much, actually. He just liked how it helped him sleep. He gave her the name of what he had chugged at home, a cider with the lowest alcohol taste to highest content that he could manage. He imagined she'd veto anything he asked for that was too strong.

"Giving yourself incentives is important." she put the tablet away, and he shrank as her attention turned to him "It's all about finding the right methods. These things, that are all in your head, once you have the knack it's like that," she snapped her fingers "Problem solved!"

He shut his mouth on how if it was that easy, her therapist would be out of a job. He had tried giving himself incentives, but then he just gave up on earning his rewards and had them whenever he wanted because he was a fucking adult, not a dog that had no choice but to play dead if it wanted a person to get the treat out of the jar. Poking his food, he doubled down on the vague noises for replies, and zoned out as she launched into a presentation, phrases like ‘self-control’, ‘willpower’, and 'you just need to show it who's boss' floating past him. He was pretty good at zoning out, he did it in meetings a lot.

"Oh, shoot." she was checking her phone "I have to take this. Mason, make sure he eats that."

Alex forced as much as he could down his neck, the android standing impassively over him until he said "Seriously, I can't fit any more, I'll fucking throw up. Can I go now?"

"You may."

He slouched back to the bedroom. He wished he'd been left to do this on his own, he couldn't put up with being babysat his whole stay, let alone by his mother and her robots. He'd never liked them, they were so uncanny valley, bordering on full-on creepy.

The city's glow illuminated the room almost as well as its actual lights would. Alex looked at his bag, at the door to the bathroom, at the bed, and dragged his feet over to the latter, collapsing back into the blanket. He didn't know where the button for the blinds was, so he put the pillow over his head and went to sleep like that.

The next morning, he was woken up at four AM by his aching, disused legs. Cursing miserably, he dragged himself up to stretch, and walk around the room, and watch videos of banal things he forgot the moment they were over. His bag loomed by the door, demanding his attention, making him feel even less like dealing with it - he paced on the other side of the room instead.

The other android came to get him for breakfast at six, and was lucky he was already on his feet, or they'd have had to drag him there. When he came into the room his mother took one look at him and actually put her tablet all the way down.

"Alex, did you sleep in those clothes? Have you showered?"

"Yes." he lied, and took the furthest stool from her. She frowned at him.

"For God's sake, Alex, have something turn it on for you if you're that incapable. You can’t just wait until you stink up the house.”

“‘S fine,” he mumbled into the food he was presented with, just trying to get through it so he could go back to bed.

“You realise the living room outside your bedroom is yours too? It’s very spacious, I’ll give you a yoga mat.”

“I’m not doing yoga.”

“Of course not, you'd rather lie around until you get bed sores. Would it really kill you to just put some effort in, I mean, what's a half hour of just getting out of bed? You have to put yourself in the right mindset-"

"I’ll think of something.” he capitulated hurriedly, just to have the awkward exchange done with, and didn’t look her in the eye.

To his credit, he did give the living room a few laps. It was at least less white and grey than the bedroom; bits of red here and there that would have been utterly underwhelming if they didn’t have the Colours Are Illegal room next door. Maybe his first big step would be streaming something off his phone through the television. That was a task that wasn’t horrifically arduous, except for right then, when he really just wanted to go back to sleep. He could still blame the jetlag. He felt totally gross, but ‘I’ll just curl up for five minutes and then change’ became ‘I’ll just curl up and lie here and think about my ruined futures’. 

He didn’t actually notice falling asleep, he was just suddenly woken by knocking once again, but this time the door opened without waiting for an answer. "Alex? Oh, you're in bed. Go and pull the blanket off him, would you?"

"Yes, ma'am."

Alex blinked groggily as he was exposed to the light. Then he jumped, staring up at the hulking figure standing over him. "What the f-"

"Language, Alex,  _ please." _

His mother had picked up his bag, carrying it across to the stupidly large walk-in wardrobe that he hadn’t so much as touched yet. 

"You should put your clothes away. So, I had to drop into the office, and honestly I had planned to get you one from the store front, but they had this one standing around, waste not, want not, he's another assembly line accident. It's ridiculous, a stripe of missing pigment and you have to double check just about every last line of code, it’s just pigment! What’s it going to do, invert the laws of robotics? Anyway, he's a military model, but they’re all interchangeable on the inside, so I’ve had him loaded up with a general care program. He can be yours, drive you everywhere and see to you around the house, so I don't have to do without mine, and we can all get on with things.” she opened the wardrobe’s doors and put the bag down in the middle “It's not dinner yet, you've got time to put your clothes away. You, make sure he does it before six. Think of a name for him, as well, Alex. I have a book of recommended ones, if you can't." 

Alex snorted quietly into the pillow. He wasn't putting up with a name like the ones she came up with - there had been a Macaulay once, he and Dana had refused to call it anything but Mac, it drove their mother mad.

"I'll call it Robert."

"Oh,  _ Alex, _ that's a hideous name."

"I like it." he didn't, particularly, but the face she made about it was very therapeutic for him.

"I'll leave the book out."

"Too late. Answer to Robert."

"I'll answer to Robert," the android intoned. The voice struck him as odd. It was too soft and high, incongruous with the musclebound body, not generic like he was expecting it to be. "If you change your mind, you can give me a new one at any time."

"Nope. Stick with that one."

"I'll leave. The book out." his mother sniffed "For when you're done being childish." she swept out of the room. Alex laughed softly to himself, and drew the blanket back over his head.

"Put my clothes away."

"Ms Greene's instructions take priority. She wants you to put your clothes away yourself."

_ "Fuck." _


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Androids are actually quite useful when you have executive dysfunction; also, Dana delights in any opportunity, as the youngest child, to bully Alex (in a loving way).

"If you're having difficulty getting out of bed, I can help."

"Yeah, go ahead and cure me." Alex muttered from inside his cocoon, but had barely finished before there were arms under him and he was being hoisted off the bed, bridal-style. "What the _ fu-" _

"Swearing is discouraged, sir."

_ "Fuck.” _ He clung to the neck of the android's shirt as it carried him over to the wardrobe, squatting down to grab his bag without tipping him out of its arms as it went. He could feel its chest humming faintly on his side, the firm press of its arms and hands holding him in place - like an electric shock, he realised how long it had been since he'd had arms around him. His mother's hug, more like a flyby from an impatient moth than a hug, didn't count.

He didn't like it. It was way too much by itself, and a mile over the line he drew regarding androids. It wasn't like the older models his mother used to have, whose flesh gave only a cursory amount before the hard plastic plates beneath could be felt; it felt like real muscle and fat, in all the right places, and that was worse. He squirmed, but he was already being deposited into an armchair in the corner, with the bag placed in his lap, and the zip opened.

“What do you want to put away first?”

He blinked at the contents, sitting unremarkable and unintimidating as a tangled mess of slightly musty clothes. Things like this always seemed like a mountain before he did them, and like a speed bump afterwards, so that he could never feel good that he'd done them but ashamed that it had taken him so long. Mutely, he handed the android the clothes one by one for it to fold them neatly and ask him which drawers to use. He'd always been self-aware about his ineptitude - having it witnessed, however, was an extra layer of discomfort he could do without.

Everything was away in minutes; all he'd had were a handful of clothes and a phone charger and a toothbrush. When he was packing he'd looked at his laptop, at his console, and left them behind in a fit of utter apathy. His phone could do most of what they did anyway, and all he ever used it for was scrolling aimlessly through videos. The others were just dead weight when he knew he wouldn't use them.

He let the android put the bag away, looking around at all the still empty shelves, he couldn't imagine having enough to fill them all. In its usual creepy way, he realised the android was staring at him - but it started to speak the moment he looked back at it.

"Do you want to shower now, sir?"

"Don't... call me sir."

"What do you want me to call you?"

"Alex. Just Alex is fine."

"Okay. I'll call you Alex."

He really didn't like that stilted intonation. The voice, though - it was somewhere between breathy and hoarse, so unlike the very distinct standard, voices that sounded like they'd break out into a commercial for paper towels or a garden hose. He wondered why they'd gone for something so different for this one. "I don't need a shower."

"Do you have difficulty showering?"

"No. I don't want to."

"Personal hygiene is important when you're unwell. If you're having difficulty showering, I can help."

"You mean pick me up and dump me in it."

"Physical assistance is one of the many benefits I can provide around the home."

Alex wrinkled his nose at the marketing spiel; he'd always been in the camp that drew the line at having things that were supposed to be yours still blasting you with adverts, like refrigerators that knew what you'd run out of and made you click past adds to get to the temperature controls, and doorbells that sang company jingles once every six rings.

"I didn't bring any soap with me."

"It's important to capitalise on success and do as much as possible while you're capable. Water is good enough."

He didn't feel very capable. But he did feel exceptionally gross, and like he didn't want to get picked up again - he could always sit in the bathroom and let the water run for a while. "Fine."

The android came back a few moments later - Alex grumblingly prevented it from carrying him again as he shuffled through to the huge bathroom where the shower was running in a glass box that looked less like a shower and more like an empty aquarium. There was a separate tub that could fit about four people in it, and everything was white and grey and- clinical, that was it. Even hotels felt more lived in than this.

The android stood beside the door inside the bathroom, hands clasped behind its back with a military air. Alex made a face and told it to go outside. "Don't just… hang around when I’m changing."

It left. How many people kept their android looming over them as they took a morning dump? He snorted, and then eyed the steaming water. It seemed less arduous now that he was just standing there - so he stripped and eased himself in.

The water was an utter fucking  _ godsend _ . 

He stuck his head all the way under to dispel as much of the sludgy feeling in his brain as possible, feeling it pour hot down his face and drip off his nose. In this at least, his mother's home was better than his; she had really good water pressure. At his salary, should he have lived somewhere with a shower that didn't dribble and drains that didn't halfway block every two weeks? Absolutely, but before he'd been struggling to shower and eat, he'd been in frantic, ever-present dread that made him manic, waiting for the day he made one tiny mistake and everyone decided he was worthless so he would never get a job again and he would eat through all his money and then he would end up on the street-

He'd moved somewhere cheaper, hoarding his money like it was all he'd have for the rest of his life. It wasn't that bad, seeing as he worked so much he almost never saw his ratty apartment. And then his boss had praised his work ethic and he'd kind of known, then, that something was going to have to snap. When he realised that now he'd set the bar  _ high, _ and he could never drop below it, and he had to keep frantically going at this pace to hide the truth of his bumbling his way into a position he didn't deserve.

He pulled the shower head off the wall and blasted himself in the face with it, gritting his teeth against the burn. The perpetual anxiety coiled in his gut was awakened and writhing now, and the only way he knew of to deal with it was to find a distraction. He yelled at his phone to play a podcast. The last one he'd listened to was about fungus, which was fascinating, only he'd started it on the way to work on that last disaster day. Now he was remembering  _ that,  _ remembering feeling jittery and like every part of him, his joints and his skin and his teeth, were tight - everything sounding tinny - being told there was a meeting, didn't you get the email? - opening the conference room door and finding everyone already there, all of them staring at him, all of their eyes boring disgustedly into him-

Sitting slumped against the wall while someone called an ambulance and someone else made him take his hyperventilating breaths into a sandwich bag.

No one coming with him to the hospital.

No one visiting him.

His fingers were pruning. He ground his forehead against the shower's tiled wall until it hurt. He'd been in here too long already; he got out, bundled himself in a towel, and knew that if he sat down with his phone he wouldn't get up again a long time.

The edge of the bath was uncomfortable, but that did nothing to dissuade him from going down a rabbit hole of people sharing stories of the dumbest reasons they'd been to the ER. It was agonisingly unsatisfying.  _ Everything _ he ever did was unsatisfying. But he'd got used to it by now, had accepted it as his new, monotonous norm. He kept on reading; at home, he'd do it until his eyes hurt, or he was too tired. Here, though, there was an eventual knock on the door. "Do you need help?"

"No, it's fine." He blinked like he was coming out of a stupor, then checked the time. Almost six? "When did I start showering?"

"Seven minutes past four."

Right, time management. Not his forte these days. "Oops." He muttered to himself.

"Do you want to change?"

"Sure." He opened the door to find the android with the clothes already in its hands. They were his, perfectly folded, smelling cleaner than they had before. Had they even been-?

"T-shirts don't need to be ironed - just putting that out there." He took them and shut the door again.

"Do you want to set that as a preference?" Was asked from the other side.

"No, I just meant- fucking stupid, what does an android care if it irons T-shirts? Nevermind." It had had two hours to kill while he mooched about in the shower, he supposed, it probably finished washing everything and had nothing better to do. And fuck if stepping into clean, incredibly crisp, still slightly warm clothes was a delight he had forgotten about. His iron at home had broken a year ago and he'd never bothered to replace it, just had the boss tentatively ask if he might 'be a little neater' when they had visitors every so often.

He got to the kitchen before his mother this time. When she found him there looking like a normal person, his hair still damp, her delight was obvious. "Look at you! Isn't that better? My goodness, he's worked a miracle." She took the seat next to him and he flinched from the attention. "I should have sent you one years ago, shouldn't I? I couldn't manage without mine, if I had given you one before…"

Alex glanced sideways at her. She sounded as brisk as ever, but there was something... she was already zipping on, too quick for him to ponder it.

"Have you thought of a better name for him yet?"

"Nope."

"Robert!" She called it over from where it seemed to have taken over in the kitchen from one of hers. "How many times has he used your name?"

"None, ma'am."

Alex made a disgusted face at it for ratting him out. Its eyes flickered to him, and it was an unpleasant kind of shock he got as for a moment they caught the light in a way that gave them the depth only human eyes had, not the glassy shallow look of the fabricated. He blinked, but it had looked away again, retreating back into the kitchen proper as his mother dismissed it with a wave.

"When you were small, you had good taste in names. You remember those plushies you had - the ones that were supposed to be shaped like diseases or something?"

Of  _ course  _ he did. He'd adored those things. "Yeah." They were in the shape of various microbes, with beady eyes to make them cute, and they were the first things that made him fascinated with tiny organisms.

"You had a yellow one you called Kian, I thought that was lovely."

"That one was herpes." He tried not to laugh too much at the face she made.

"If David had told me what it actually  _ was _ that he was giving a six-year-old I would have thrown them out. That  _ aside, _ you came up with lots of good names."

"Why'd you call me Alex if you like weird names so much?"

"I called you Alexander because your father wouldn't agree to anything else." She accepted her comically large wine glass just in time to sip with an offended air. "And you never responded to Xander."

“Thank God.” He muttered into his own glass, and they ate dinner without any meaningful conversation.

Just before he scuttled off, she handed him a little shiny card. "You won't need it, but health and safety and such. It's his emergency shutdown, either you press it to his forehead for three seconds or you read out the code on it.  _ Don't _ use it for anything less than an emergency,  _ please, _ it's really not good for them."

"In case it tries to murder me?"

"In case he  _ malfunctions." _ She rolled her eyes. "The last time anyone had to use an emergency shutdown for a  _ valid _ reason was the Colchester attack, do you remember that? Too young I suppose. The android had been so damaged she couldn't verify that it was the police asking her to open the door, so she didn't, because she was  _ protecting _ her charges. They had to shut her down to get in and let the children out. She's still owned by the same daycare, I think, I know there was a huge fundraiser to cover the cost of her repairs, I mean it went into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But people do get fond of their machines."

"If I hid up a ladder from an angry dog I wouldn't be giving the ladder a medal." Alex snorted as he left, the android following behind him.

_ “How’s it going? How’s the witch’s lair? She tried to make you into a pie yet?” _

“Ha ha.” Alex flopped backwards onto the bed, phone in hand. “Excruciating. She got me a fucking android.”

_ “Should’ve seen that coming, I guess. Nice though, your own for free, haven't you missed being in your own creepy moving mannequin horror flick? Send pics.” _

He turned on the camera. “Robert!”

_ “Is that seriously its name?” _

“Yeah, she hates it.”

_ “Genius.” _

The android emerged from the bathroom with Alex’s used towel. Alex pointed his camera at it. “Just stand there for a sec.” 

There was a pause long enough that he had to check that the call was still going. “Dana?”

_ "Oh... my God?”  _ Her voice was strained.  _ “She- did she get you a  _ _sexbot_ _?"  _ The strain burst into peals of laughter - Alex almost dropped his phone.

"What?” He found himself turning off speakerphone hurriedly. “No! It's just-  _ fuck _ no, it's a military or police model or something."

_ "Uh huh. Look at its tits! Are you kidding me? And why is its shirt like that?" _

"They don't make household uniforms that big, okay? They probably had to shove it into a too small one. It's  _ not _ a fuckbot."

_ "Okay, sure," _ she was doing a terrible job of stifling her laughter  _ "But they all come with the full set, don't they?" _

_ "Bye, _ Dana."

_"Okay, okay, I'll stop!"_ A final giggle. _"Still, if that thing’s supposed to be taking care of you, it means she has less excuses to poke her nose into your business, right? If she isn't the one in charge of it, and you're feeling_ ** _really_** _shit, it might be a bit useful."_

"I… guess." He loathed to have to admit out loud that it had gotten more out of him in a day than he could have made himself do in a month. "It ironed all my T-shirts, I forgot how _ like that  _ they are.”

_ "Pains in the ass? Macaulay always scrubbed off the patterns I would draw on my sneakers, y'know the rubber rim bit? Think of all the secret parties we missed out on, because there was a fucking android ready to snitch when the parents got back." _

"We?"

_ "Alright, me, I missed out, and you could've sat in your room and brooded. Still better if there isn't an android at your door telling you you've got an hour left to put the trash out." _

"I'm a big boy now, I can always turn it off." He flicked the card his mother had given him.

_ "Yeah, that's one benefit to them." _

He realised the android was still standing there waiting for him to dismiss it, so he did. It didn't move. He glanced up, but the second he did it turned and went out with the towel. He was too busy with the call to pay any more attention, or to notice it come back; it was just standing by the door when he hung up. The bright city outside the windows shone obnoxiously into the room - so he made the android close the curtains and after about five minutes of it looming there in the gloom like a nightmare, told it to stand in the closet for the night.

"Do you want to change your clothes?" It asked him, not leaving.

"Can't be bothered to. Closet."

It did as it was told. In the gloom, he lay wide awake, trying to reason with the little shard of human instinct that felt like an  _ asshole.  _ He knew the details that demystified androids - the algorithms that made them copy the tics of the people around them, the board meetings that decided on their accent, the thousands of programmers that went into their every smile, and the charts and spreadsheets about how everything came back to what suckered people into buying more.  _ Everything _ about an android was intricately designed to infiltrate a home, to fool a person, to inspire affection. There were stories everywhere about androids with 'personality' that anyone with an inch of knowhow could disprove. Androids looked like people because it made real people like them more, made them read masterful coding as human emotion - it was all synthetic fibre on a metal skeleton underneath, just a bunch of fancy electrics.

Regardless, it looked human, and Alex's brain was still the same shape and filled with the same patterns as the humans who had hunted and gathered their way out of Africa a hundred thousands of years ago, leaving the bones of their kin in their wake. Those bones, revealing crippling injury given time to heal, or buried with tender care and treasures, showed just how long humanity had known compassion.

He could picture the board meetings that must have been held to discuss how best to turn that glue holding humanity together into a machine to spit out money; he left the android in the closet. He still felt like an asshole. Just another reason on top of the pile not to get any sleep.


End file.
